The 7 Worst Sex Lives in the Animal Kingdom

#3. Histiostoma Murchiei Males Only Live Long Enough for Quick Incest

If any of you men feel as though you're constantly treated as mere sex objects for hordes of sexy, superficial women, then spare a thought for Histiostoma murchiei, a tiny parasitic mite, the males of which exist just long enough to be exploited for their man seed.

Initially, the female mite will lay an egg that hatches into a male, ready to go forth and live a long and fruitful dude life. Except that never happens, because as soon as he tumbles out of the egg, his mother grabs him and starts using him as a sex slave. His mother.

GettyAnd as Oedipus Rex can tell you, that ain't no good.

What the male doesn't know is that she only created him for the express purpose of reimpregnating herself so she can give birth to her "real" children -- 500 baby daughters.

To make matters worse, before he gets to meet his 500 children/sisters, he dies, having used up his brand new life energy in a burst of incest before he knew what was happening. The 500 female babies, on the other hand, go on to lead completely full and long lives in which they eventually bang their own infant sons.

#2. Green Spoon Worm Males Spend Life as Imprisoned Parasite Slaves

When a green spoon worm is born, it doesn't have any gender. It just floats around in the ocean, showing no preference to either fire trucks or Bratz dolls. Its gender will be determined by what happens in its first three weeks of life, and it probably hopes to be female. Otherwise, it's going to spend the rest of its life vomiting sperm onto its wife's ovaries, begging to be allowed to die.

Wikimedia CommonsThere's a Courtney Love joke in all of this, but we're just not sure where.

What happens is the larvae that make it safely to the ocean floor without incident grow up to be females about eight to 15 centimeters long. The larvae that instead get attached to one of the adult females becomes a male.

This male worm is only 1 or 2 millimeters long, and it is immediately inhaled by the female. But it doesn't die. No, nature is not that kind. Instead, it lives the rest of its life trapped inside the female's ovary, in a chamber called the androecium, which literally means "the small man room."

This image was taken by undercover aid workers, who left in disgust.

Once there, it has no purpose but to continually spew sperm onto her eggs to inseminate them. Obviously it can't eat, because its mouth is busy 24 hours a day, so it has to absorb its nutrients from the female while she belittles him for being a parasite.

#1. The Redback Spider Gets Eaten While He's Boning

Nobody expects spiders to have great bedroom manners. But the redback spider, a species of black widow native to Australia (where else?), is the only species where the male will deliberately offer himself as food to the female.

Being a dude spider is already kind of a rough deal, since male spiders tend to be much smaller than their female counterparts, and spider females have a notoriously difficult time distinguishing between their partners and their dinner. If you can imagine trying to have sex with an angry grizzly bear, that's what male spiders have to deal with every time they get laid.

The actual act of sex between spiders is a little more complicated than our "roll on, gyrate, roll off" version. Male spiders have to wrangle females like rodeo cowboys long enough to insert their pedipalps into two slots in the female's abdomen. This process takes some time, and when your mate is 10 times bigger than you and actively trying to murder you through the entire act, it's in your benefit to have some kind of distraction.

The redback spider alone is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for poontang. He just goes right ahead and impales himself on her ravenous fangs, keeping her busy for just long enough, hopefully, to complete the deed before he dies in screaming agony. You may be thinking this is all pretty counterintuitive for reproduction's sake, but most female spiders have the ability to store sperm without it going bad, so they only have to mate once to keep making babies for the rest of their lives. It's like they have their own private IVF clinic, but with more murder.